Every House Is Haunted (33 page)

The following week a series of thunderstorms rolled through town and Tad learned something else about his Cordovian Tattletail. One of those things they neglected to mention in the text books.

He had gone out to the woodshed around eight that morning, as had been his routine since becoming a pet-owner. He had put on his slicker and galoshes and went out to the chopping block where Dennis liked to sleep. Usually the demon was awake and waiting for him, red eyes gleaming, mouth open and salivating. But not today. Tad found Dennis lying on his side with his back to him. He didn’t appear to be breathing.

Tad ran over and crouched down next to Dennis. He felt for a pulse and located it—both of them, in fact—but it was low, very low. And his breathing was very shallow. Tad timed it on his Casio as only two or three breaths a minute.

“
Dennis! Dennis, wake up!
”

He grabbed the demon’s long, scrawny arm and shook it. Two red pinpricks of light appeared in the deep hollows of his eyes. Tad untied him and carried him back to the house. Tad’s dad remarked that Dennis smelled worse wet than he did dry and disappeared back behind his paper. Tad’s mother told him to take Dennis out to the greenhouse.

Tad did as he was told, carrying the demon out to the greenhouse and placing him on the workbench. He turned on the heat lamp his mother used for the few tropical plants she grew and trained the light onto Dennis. He wasn’t thinking about the talent contest. He just wanted Dennis to be okay. He never had a pet before and hadn’t expected to feel so attached to it. It wasn’t a bad feeling.

“Photosynthesis,” Tad said for the third time. He spoke in the tone of someone discussing festering wounds and putrescent corpses. “Photo-stinkin-synthesis.”

It was Monday. The thunderstorms had packed their bags and moved on. Dennis was on the mend, but Tad’s prospects of winning the Blackloch talent show were not good.

It turned out the Cordovian Tattletail took on more characteristics of his diet than just its colour. One could go so far as to say that feeding on plants had turned Dennis into a vegetable. Literally. As such, Dennis was subject to certain biological requirements. Like sunlight. Without it, Dennis became slow and sluggish. The previous week’s thunderstorms hadn’t been enough to kill him, but they had sent Dennis into a coma-like state. He was also growing what appeared to be a set of branches out of his back.

Life was funny sometimes. Tad had a demon that need sunlight to live, while his sister Lizzie, who had been turned into a vampire the past summer, would be reduced to dust if she so much as stepped outside to fetch the mail. Oh yes, life was just a laugh-and-a-half.

Dennis looked like a skinless pony—a
green
,
skinless pony—and compared to some of the demons the other kids would be bringing, that was about as scary as a game of patty-cake. If Tad was going to make Dennis scarier, he would have to feed him something a bit more exotic than ferns and ficus.

Tad checked the chains for the seventh time, confirmed that they were fastened tightly, and returned to the chopping block where a pair of boxes were stacked one on top of the other. Dennis blinked questionably at his master with his large, expressive eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Tad said. He felt bad about chaining Dennis up, but it was in lieu of adult supervision.

He opened the first box, which was full of frozen porterhouse steaks Tad’s parents had bought at the Price Club. He took one out and tapped it against the cordless phone sticking out of the waistband of his pants. The steaks were for Dennis: he needed a new diet if he was going to make an impression at the talent contest. The phone was for Tad, in case the New and Improved Dennis decided he wanted something more to eat than frozen steaks. Like Tad, for instance.

“Okay, buddy. It’s magic time.” He raised the steak high over his head, which Dennis had quickly learned was the signal for dinnertime. “Open wide!”

Tad tossed the steak and Dennis made it disappear. They repeated the process until the box was empty. As Dennis was downing the last steak, the transformation began.
It’s happening faster now
, Tad thought, fascinated and a little frightened, as the demon’s long limbs grew even longer. His teeth were growing, too. It looked as if knitting needles had inexplicably grown out of his gums.

Tad touched the phone with a reassuring hand, ready to punch in 911 if Dennis showed any sign of biting the hand that had fed him. But Dennis wasn’t making any such motions. In fact, he wasn’t moving at all.

“Dennis?
Dennis?
”

He reached out and gave him a slight shake. The demon’s skin (it had changed colour from fern-green to the pinkish-red of raw hamburger) was cool to the touch. Cold.

Frozen.

Tad bit his lip.

“Oh damn.”

On the day of the talent show, Tad and his father secured Dennis to the roof of the family station wagon with bungee cords and drove over to Blackloch. The demon was still a gruesome thing, John Smith opined, and he still smelled like dead fish set on fire, but he commended Tad on a fine job of raising Dennis and keeping him docile. Tad almost told him that if anything should be thanked it was the frozen porterhouses, but then figured his mother and father could find out about that in their own time (and if he won the talent contest and was able to replace the steaks with the prize money, they needn’t know at all).

After they had unloaded Dennis at the rear of the school gymnasium, where the contest was being held, Tad walked his dad back to the station wagon.

“Make sure you get him inside before he thaws.”

“I will, Dad. And thanks for driving us.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to stick around?”

“No parents allowed. You remember what happened at last year’s Science Fiction Fair?”

John smiled reflectively. “Oh yes. I forgot about the no-parental-influence rule. It’s probably for the best.”

“I’ll call you after it’s over.”

“Good luck, son. And good luck to Dennis.” He stuck out his hand.

Tad shook it. “Thanks, Dad.”

The judge was Mr. Farley, one of Blackloch’s art teachers. His area of expertise was still-lifes, but he wasn’t impressed with Tad’s frozen Cordovian Tattletail.

“Master Smith,” he said in the lofty cadences that only art teachers can reach, “you should know better than to try and pass off this . . . this
model
as the real thing.”

A few of the other student-contestants snickered. One of them was holding a scraggly, red feline—a were-cat, as it were—with the unfortunate name of Hexxy. Its owner had trained it to fetch sticks.

“It’s not a model,” Tad protested. “Dennis is a real Tattletail. But he’s also—”

“Dennis?” Farley said. “What kind of name is that for a demon?”

It beats Hexxy
, Tad almost said.

“I’m afraid the only tattletale here is you, Master Smith. But if you’d like to submit
Dennis
as your art final, I’m sure something could be arranged.”

This time the students laughed openly. Hexxy the were-cat hissed and took a swipe at one of the other contest entries, a Bolo Jumping Spider; it leaped up onto one of the basketball nets and glared down balefully.

“I assure you Dennis is very much alive. But he’s so ferocious I have to keep him in this frozen state or else he might . . . well, he might run amok.”

“Run amok, huh?” Farley said, grinning wryly. “So why don’t we take him outside into the sun and see what happens?”

Tad said, “I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Come, come,” Farley said, clapping his hands for emphasis. “We can bind him to the megaliths on the grounds. Just so he doesn’t ‘run amok.’”

The students laughed again. Tad seemed to have no choice. He manoeuvred the push-cart on which Dennis stood outside, into the sun. Mr. Farley and Tad tied Dennis’s arms to a pair of the runic pillars that were scattered across the grounds of Blackloch like strange stunted tree trunks. He seemed to take great pleasure in hamming it up for the students—tiptoeing around the inert demon, binding its arms in a mincing burlesque of fright. The students snickered and laughed, but it was clear to Tad that most of them thought Farley was pouring it on a little thick. On the other hand, if this is what it took to prove that Dennis was truly a flesh and blood Tattletail, then so be it.

“So here we are,” Farley said in his rich and mellifluous voice. “Just you, me, your classmates, and your demon. Are you ready to confess, or shall we waste more of everyone’s time?”

Tad was feeling the pressure of being the subject of attention. Dennis seemed to be feeling it, too, because he appeared to be sweating buckets.

The Bolo Jumping Spider had come out with the students and hopped onto one of the pillars to which Dennis had been tied. Now it leaped onto the wide, football-shaped head of the demon and made as if to scamper down its quickly thawing body. It was skittering across Dennis’s chest when the demon regained its
savoir faire
and plucked the spider up in one enormous hand and deposited it in his mouth.

“Gross
out!
” cried a red-haired girl named Tart Williams. In her hands was something that looked like an octopus spliced with a Brillo pad.

Dennis let out a thunderous growl that heralded the fleshy explosion of another four limbs that erupted out of his sides. His voice degenerated into a loud insectile buzzing that sounded to Tad like the hum of high-tension wires cranked up to a deafening volume.

Despite Mr. Farley’s shortcomings in the personality department, he was no coward. He leapt between Dennis and the students, picking up one of the ropes that had bound the demon’s hands, and pulled it so hard the cords in his neck stood out.

“
Down! Down! Hie!
”

He jerked the rope, but he might as well have been trying to bring an ocean liner to heel. Dennis gave a jerk of his own and Mr. Farley was suddenly airborne.

Tad watched as the art teacher landed in a crumpled heap, and thought:
If I don’t get expelled for this it’ll be a miracle
.

Joey Lawson, the kid who had trained his were-cat to fetch sticks, was standing a few feet away from Dennis, staring at the demon with an expression that could have been total amazement or paralyzing terror. Hexxy hissed at the demon, leaped out of Joey’s arms, and bolted into the Avebury Woods.